Thursday, 31 July 2003

"Last year, 184 Colombia unionists were assassinated by paramilitaries just for being trade unionists. Over 4000 have been murdered since 1986.

Isidro Segundo Gil was killed inside the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa by right-wing paramilitaries on December 5, 1996. Isidro was the president of the local union, and was involved with negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement with the company. Four days later, the paramilitaries entered the plant and gave the union members until 4 P.M. to resign from the union. Fifty workers signed identical resignation letters and the local union was disbanded. Prior to Isidro’s murder, the plant manager boasted that he had given an order to the paramilitaries to destroy the union. The union sent a letter to Coca-Cola expressing concern about this threat, but the company failed to respond.

The most recent killing was of Adolfo Munera, who was shot to death in the doorway of his mother’s house in Barranquilla on August 31, 2002. Adolfo was murdered just nine days after the Constitutional Court of Colombia decided to review his case against Coca-Cola.

To reduce its labor costs, Coke dismissed more than 10,000 workers in Colombia during the 1990s. Now, more than three-fourths of the Coke workers are temporary employees or contractors – many of whom earn just the minimum wage of $114 per month."

"MOST Arab and European telecoms companies have been barred from bidding for lucrative contracts to provide mobile phone services in Iraq.

So far, it is US companies that have dominated the general contracts awarded as part of the postwar reconstruction of the Middle East country. In April the US construction giant Bechtel was named as the prime contractor in rebuilding Iraq. Halliburton, the oil services group once led by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, won the job of reconstruction of the oil fields."

THE CORPORATE FALLOUT DETECTOR READS BARCODES off of consumer products, and MAKES A NOISE OF VARYING INTENSITY similar to a gieger counterbased on the social or environmental record of the company that produces the product.(via my analog life)

"On Friday a four-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by a soldier - the most recent child victim of the Israeli army. Chris McGreal investigates in today's guardian."

The numbers are staggering; one in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000. Nearly half were killed in the Gaza strip, and most of those died in two refugee camps in the south, Khan Yunis and Rafah. The PCHR says they were victims of "indiscriminate shooting, excessive force, a shoot-to-kill policy and the deliberate targeting of children".

The rate of killing since the beginning of the ceasefire has dropped sharply, but almost every day the army has continued to fire heavy machineguns into Khan Yunis or Rafah. Among the latest victims of apparently indiscriminate shooting were three teenagers and an eight-year-old, Yousef Abu Jaza, hit in the knee when soldiers shot at a group of children playing football in Khan Yunis.

The military says it is difficult to distinguish between youths and men who might be Palestinian fighters, but the statistics show that nearly a quarter of the children killed were under 12. Last year alone, 50 children under the age of eight were shot dead or blown up by the Israeli army in Gaza.

Sunday, 27 July 2003

Goddess of the rain. Djanggawul sisters/daughters of the sun, these Australian goddesses unceasingly brought forth living creatures from their endlessly pregnant bodies. Their long vulvas broke off piece by piece with these births, producing the world's first sacred artifacts.

Friday, 25 July 2003

BIG BROTHER 2003

and so, after 9 weeks of the most passive and blank housemates to date, cameron the creepy bible-reading bigot is voted this year's big brother uk winner........ unavoidably contextualised within a world dominated by a far right christian superpower with a foreign policy composed of death-camps and sexual-abstinence.

The Hedley Kow was a naughty, shapechanging, playful elf who lived near the village of Hedley. His appearance was not scary and his tricks were usually harmless, which he always ended with a neighing laughter. A typical trick was to change himself into a bunch of straw. When an elderly woman gathering wood picked up the straw, it suddenly became so heavy she had to put it down. Immediately the straw became 'alive' and then it scuttled away laughing. Other tricks included imitating the voice of a lover, feeding cream to cats, and turning over a bowl of soup.

Paulos wants to add an additional layer of wireless digital information over the existing layer of physical markers. This is what he calls the Digital Patina. One of the first examples of this, he thinks, will be the use of RFID tags to leave messages for other people who visit a public space.

Imagine having a pocket full of RFID tags. They'd look like little dot-shaped band-aids. If you were in a restaurant and you just ate the best créme brulee in your entire life, you might want to place a tag under the table with a URL to your plug for the dessert, so that other patrons with a wearable scanner could heed your recommendation.

Audiopad is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music.

you can pull sounds from a giant store of samples, juxtapose archived recordings against synthetic melodies, cut between drum loops to create new beats, and apply digital processing all at the same time on the same table. Audiopad not only allows for spontaneous reinterpretation of musical compositions, but also creates a visual and tactile dialogue between itself, the performer, and the audience.
(check the video of audiopad in action)
(via my analog life)

Neurofeedback monitors brain activity through sensors attached to the scalp. filtered brainwaves are then 'fed back' to the individual in the form of a video game displayed on a screen.

The participant learns to control the game by altering particular aspects of their brain activity.

Research, to be published in the journal Neuroreport, indicates the technique helps musicians to improve by an average of 17% - the equivalent of one grade or class of honours. Some improved by as much as 50%.

Amid the local and national stories of troops returning home to joyous family reunions at Ft. Stewart in Georgia, there are new stories that some of the troops are openly questioning the Bush Administration's policy in iraq(via indymedia)

The Bush administration yesterday took the extraordinary step of publishing grisly photographs of two corpses in the hope of persuading Iraqis that Uday and Qusay Hussein were dead, despite the misgivings of senior officers who feared the decision set a dangerous precedent.

citing the military tradition of respecting enemy dead, concern over appearing to gloat over the bloody damaged bodies, and fear of setting a precedent that could easily backfire for families of American soldiers. In the past, Washington has responded angrily to any publication of photographs of American dead. when dead US soldiers were shown by Iraqi television and Arab networks, Washington condemned the broadcasts. General John Abizaid, now commander of US troops across the Middle East, described them as "disgusting".

One Iraqi newspaper claimed to have conducted an instant poll, in which 80% of Iraqis questioned said they thought the Uday and Qusay Hussein pictures were a fabrication.

a microchip the size of a grain of rice that is implanted into the arm or hip has hit the market in Mexico to assist with identification and management of medical data.
Called VeriChip, the device is a secure, subdermal radio frequency identification microchip developed by Palm Beach, Florida-based Applied Digital Solutions for security, financial, emergency and medical applications

"In a matter of seconds, it provides extremely important information in the event of an emergency and regardless of the condition of the patient, information that could mean the difference between life and death."

The chip is inserted with a syringe-like device using local anesthetic. It contains a unique verification number that is captured by a proprietary scanner, which picks up the radio frequency signal that the chip transmits.
Microchip identification has been used in animals for years, but human use has been controversial.

"A US patent has been awarded for a tiny wireless gripper that can manipulate microscopic objects such as proteins and genetic components, a step towards nanoscale robots that can do such things as clean your arteries and eradicate tumors. operated wirelessly by focused beams of energy, the microactuators can control objects as small as 100 nanometers."

"Severely disabled people who can't operate a motorised wheelchair may one day gain independence via a system that lets them steer a wheelchair using only their thoughts.

Unlike previous thought-communication devices, the system does not use surgical implants. Instead a skullcap peppered with electrodes monitors the electrical activity of its wearer's brain. Early trials using a steerable robot indicate that with just two days training it is as easy to control the robot with the human mind as it is manually."

Wednesday, 23 July 2003

creepy bible-reading Cameron was asked whether he thought gay couples should be allowed to marry.

He said: "I'm definitely of the opinion that couples should be husband and wife, not two husbands or two wives.

"What I'm basing it on is my beliefs that are found in the Bible that says that a man should not lie with a man."

he left the diary room with a worried expression on his face, it begs the question as to whether he thinks his views may have cost him the £70,000 prize. I FUCKING HOPE IT HAS. he should never have got this far in the first place.

Camerons already stated his opposition to equal pay for women, and that he would never want a woman to go to a business meeting in case she got loud and opinionated

and when asked whether he agreed with parents smacking their children.
he predictably replied “Yes, I do, I think the threat of a smack is a successful deterrent to being naughty. But if kids know it’s only going to be a threat, and not carried out, it’s pointless.”

Cameron also felt it was not necessary to introduce a law to protect children: “There might be a case for a belt or something…”

some light-entertainment droid was chatting on the telly about his attempt to stop smoking. he'd stopped for 11 months, but he said they were the worst 11 months of his life. finally he asked himself what was the love of his life and the answer was a cigarette. so he started again.

and then he said he wished they'd make cigarettes illegal.

i find the implications of this statement exasperatingly bizarre. that firstly he wants the state to intervene in his choices (his proclaimed pleasures) and secondly that he'd therefore actually obey the state if told that something is officially forbidden.

could you script, shoot and edit a 5 minute short film on dv in just 48 hours?

register and then come along on August 16th to your nearest participating venue and receive an envelope containing the TITLE and GENRE for a film you have to complete within 48hours! The film must have a minimum of two in the cast and be no longer or shorter than five minutes.

in march 2003 a senior spanish Socialist politician, the former mayor of Barcelona Pascual Maragall, accused Spain's anti-terrorist police of torturing a Basque newspaper editor.

Amnesty International has received some very serious and highly detailed reports of torture in spain, which appear to be corroborated by medical evidence. an amnesty report said. "Many of the allegations referred to _ asphyxiation with plastic bags, repeated kicks and blows of the hand on the head or testicles, forced physical exercises for long periods of time, claims of sexual harassment _ threats of execution, rape, miscarriage or injury to partners and relatives."

Historically, Basques are one of the most repressed people in Spain, if not the world.

the Basque separatists ETA, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, founded in 1959, have carried out periodic campaigns against tourism targets, generally without killing anyone, since 1979 in an attempt to damage one of Spain's main industries. But in the past 18 months eight people have died in its bomb and shooting attacks on tourist targets.

More than 200 suspected members have been arrested in that time, including 10 picked up at the weekend by the Mexican police.

its typical that the "democratic" route, always so loudly trumpetted by media talking-heads, was stuffed up in may 2003 when the Spanish supreme court barred 241 political groups from contesting municipal elections in the Basque region on the grounds that they are related to the armed separatist group Eta or its supporters.

The decision was made five weeks after the court banned the radical separatist political party Batasuna, which had 10% of the Basque vote, under a new law forbidding parties to encourage violence. this despite the spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar and his People's party government wedging their collective heads firmly up george bush's arse in support of the iraq war.

The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky (Penguin Books)
"While Basque history parallels the formation of Spain up to a point, the region's people have consciously and unconsciously diverged for hundreds, even thousands, of years. The Basque story is a necessary aside from Spanish history and a story that, officially, is rarely told."

Tuesday, 22 July 2003

Article three of the Human Rights Act says "no one shall be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".

An MI5 expert in terrorism has admitted that the security service would use information extracted from tortured prisoners as evidence in court.

meanwhile a US military coroner, Elizabeth Rowse, ruled that two men from Afghanistan held at a secret CIA interrogation centre at Bagram air base had been killed under interrogation. She confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide".

Malcolm Smart, director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, criticised the government for being party to torture, "either directly or by proxy".

He said: "Information obtained under torture is cheap and dirty information. British intelligence should regard it with the deepest suspicion. It is well-established that such information is not reliable. International law requires that courts reject evidence gathered by torture as inadmissible. If the intelligence services are cooperating in this way then they are in effect condoning, even encouraging, the torturers."

Basil Fernando, the Executive Director of the Asian Human Rights Commission, a member of the OMCT network, has stated that, “the argument favouring limited use of torture is contradicted by all of our experience. When torture is no longer absolutely prohibited, law enforcement attitudes change. Over time, the mentality that torture is acceptable comes to infect the entire system, and even persons accused of normal crimes get the same treatment as suspected terrorists…"

"Cameron is a committed Christian, who needs your prayers. Many feel that it is sheer folly to be involved with a programme such as Big Brother, but God’s ways are not our ways and he has allowed Cameron to do it. We have to trust there is a purpose in this."

then of course their "god's ways" are spookily very similar to the ways of endemol. watching and judging 24 hours a day, and not just for 9 weeks. their god is forever.

let ray win, let scott the attractive houseplant win. hell even if that scary chipmonk ventriliquist's dummy steph wins, i'll promise never to sprinkle her with shake n vac if i ever pass her in the street. just please please not the bible reader.

"Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless
coffee? or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN." (Communique 8)

Thirty years ago, the Angry Brigade launched a string of bombing attacks against the heart of the British Establishment. No one was killed.
chronology69-72

In the series of 25 bombings attributed to them no one was killed (one person was slightly injured), but they were a serious embarrassment to Edward Heath's government. For a brief period between August 1970 and August 1971, the authorities were unable to stop a group of left-wing adventurers bombing the homes of Tory politicians, as well as government and corporate offices.

in the late 60s a radical splinter group broke off from SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), convinced that only militant action could end racism, U.S. complicity in atrocities at home (assassinations) and abroad (Vietnam), an end to monogamy and the inequalities they felt inherent in a capitalist society. The Weather Underground engaged in numerous bombings that landed them on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

in a new yorker article, the Weather Underground is depicted as a group that found murder "cool" and violence "hip." members were charismatic, provocative, articulate, and intelligent. They commanded news media attention with their brash rhetoric, violent actions, and, in the eyes of many, romantic allure. Chic radicals, they seemed to treat their violence at once as very serious business and as kind of a lark. they blew up a statue of a policeman. they even busted timothy leary out of jail.

"When you feel that you have right on your side," says Weatherman Brian Flanagan, "you can do some pretty horrific things." (tony blair take note).

weatherman Naomi Jaffe argues that to have watched passively in the face of the U.S. government's own violence itself constituted a form of violence, or at least an endorsement of it. “Doing nothing in a period of violence is a form of violence,”

the weathermen were bringing the war home.

at the end of Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary "The Weather Underground" Naomi Jaffe, older, married with children, reflects that her beliefs haven't changed so much as the times; if not for her family, she tells us, sure, she'd do it all over again.

Interview With Mark Rudd Former Weatherman
What are your thoughts when you see your younger self in The Weather Underground documentary?

Mark Rudd: "It's a mixture, of a certain kind of pride. You know, that I stood up. ..... standing up against U.S. imperialism, I think it's something that needed to be done then, and something that needs to be done now."

"In July of 1971, Institut Allensbach, a public research firm with a standing and reputation similar to Gallup, published a remarkable poll. Twenty percent of Germans under the age of thirty expressed "a certain sympathy" for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a group with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the West German government. One in ten young Northern Germans indicated that they would willingly shelter a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang for the night."

"The Baader-Meinhof Gang assumed their wave of terror would force the state to respond with brutal, reflexive anger. They assumed that West German civil liberties and civil rights would be quashed as the state turned the clock back 25 years. They assumed that the proletarian West Germans would react in horror as the true nature of their own government was revealed."

"They assumed that factory workers, bakers, and miners, would be inspired to smash their own oppressors. They assumed that they would be the vanguard of a movement where millions of Germans brought Revolution home."

Original Red Army Faction Communiqués and Statements (mostly in german)
It was part of the ideology of the Baader-Meinhof Gang to release a public communiqué after virtually every terrorist action. Invariably they would be sent to a press agency or an underground newspaper to guarantee publication. The purpose of the communiqué was to inform the proletariat of their reasons for their actions.

...And you open the door and you
step inside. We're inside our
hearts. Now, imagine your pain as a
white ball of healing light. That's
right, it's your pain the pain itself is a ball of
healing light.

i don't think so

This is your life
Good to the last drop
doesn't get any better than this

This is your
life, and it's ending one minute at
a time.

This isn't a seminar
This is no weekend retreat
Where you are now
You can't even imagine what the bottom will be like
Only after disaster can we be resurrected
It's only after you've lost everything that you are free to do anything

Nothing is static
Everything is evolving
Everything is falling apart
This is your life
It doesn't get any better than this
This is your life
And its ending one minute at a time

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else
We are all part of the same compost heap
We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world

You are not your bank account
You are not the clothes you wear
You are not the contents of your wallet

You are not your bowel cancer
You are not your grand latte?
You are not the car you drive
You are not your fucking khakis?

You have to give up
You have to give up
You have to realise that someday you will die
Until you know that, you are useless.

I say let me be never complete
I say may I never be content
I say deliver me from Swedish furniture
I say deliver me from clever art
I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth

I say you have to give up
I say evolve and let the chips fall where they may
This is your life

Doesn't get any better than this
This is your life
And its ending one minute at a time

You have to give up
You have to give up
(I want you to hit me as hard as you can)
Welcome to Fight Club
If this is your first night, you have to fight.

Saturday, 19 July 2003

just as the hands in M.C. Escher's "Drawing Hands" both create and are created by each other, the self and society are in a constant interdependent process of mutual recreation.

the fundamental building blocks that tend to make up the "reality" (the consensual reality) accepted by the majority of individuals (or subset of individuals) are something that have been crystallised by habit into institutions that are propped up by language conventions.

in an endless looping process it is subjectively internalised by upbringing and education to become a "natural" part of the identity and underlying assumptions of social citizens." it is maintained by laws, therapies, mass communications and social customs.

the self is an illusion, a socially constructed reality - there are multiple other ways of being and thinking about personal identity - but such a proposition seems to contradict plain "common sense". even people who accept the idea in the abstract don't necessarily get it in a way that can make any difference to how they experience daily life.

reality is most likely a prison.

The theory of reality enforcement holds that belief in consensus reality is "enforced" or promoted through a variety of means including sanctions applied against those who challenge it.

was i conceived from an orgasmic fuck or a dull work-a-day fuck? what was my intra-uterine experience? what was i pre-conception?

the family's role in inducing the base of conformity. the violation of personal temporalisation. personal time versus society's time-keeping. the taboo of aloneness. the myth of stranger danger and the irony of the bourgeois nuclear family unit as the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting.

bringing up a child is in practice more like bringing down a person. education is similarly leading a person out of him/herself and away from him/herself.

the social function of the family as an ideological conditioning device (reality enforcer) in an exploitative society (slave society, feudal society, capitalist society). the family over the last 2 centuries has mediated an invasiveness into the lives of individuals that is essential to the continued operating of imperialising capitalism.

the family's social obligation to filter out most of our experience and deprive our acts of any genuine and generous spontaneity. the assassins of thought and feeling.

normality, the sorry fate of most of us.

the well conditioned, endlessly obedient citizen. so estranged from one's own experience, from every spontaneous impulse, from every bit of awareness of one's self or one's body for oneself (rather than one's body as an object for inspection by others in the world). this normal person is literally out of his/her mind. but the pay off for murdering their selves, for losing their minds, can be considerable: affluence, material comforts, social power.

the nuclear family and the bourgeois state are tranquilliser pills and most tranquilisers make people fat, impotent and tame

Reality in everyday usage means 'everything that exists'. The term 'Reality', in its most liberal sense, includes everything that there is, whether or not it is observable, accessible or understandable by science, philosophy or any other system of analysis. Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas "existence" is often restricted to being.

In philosophy of science, anti-realism applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of "unobservable" entities such as electrons, which are not detectable with our normal human senses but which many nonetheless claim are real.

In Slavonic legend, Leshies are spirits of the forests. They were all shape-changers and could make themselves small enough to hide under leaves. Usually they remain in human form, but they are easily recognized due to their blue complexion, a result of their blue blood. They also had long green beards. Their eyes are also green and pop out of their sockets. Some people say that they wear their clothes backwards and wear their shoes on the wrong feet.

Friday, 18 July 2003

BIG BROTHER EVICTION NIGHT

Of the 1,422,858 votes cast, 471,346 (33.13%) voted for Cameron and 951,512 (66.87%) voted to evict Nush. This is the highest number of viewer votes received for a single eviction since the start of the fourth series.

obviously the dregs of christianity have been dialling in force to back bible-reading creepy cameron and he knew this was guaranteed from the start. but i can't help despairing at the thought of living in a world where there are some people who actually like him.

these messages written bold and extra large on tobacco and cigarette packages function to attract new young smokers, by appealing to the daredevil rebellious aspect of youth, while simultaneously operating as deeply embedded mantras ensuring that a percentage of smokers will psychosomatically self-induce ill health through guilt and fear.

Tony Blair last night used the rare opportunity of a historic address to the US Congress to declare that history would "forgive" him even if no weapons of mass destruction are uncovered in Iraq.

he said "Let us say one thing. If we are wrong we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering."

blah blah blah and anyone who sucessfully attacks america and britain can justifiably say something uncannily similar mr.bleurgh. because, (and i really do hate having to state the obvious), pre-emptive war IS terrorism.

meanwhile "The prime minister received 19 standing ovations during his 32-minute speech." he received the strongest applause when he resorted to the kind of pantomime patriotism that has appealed to simple fascist folk throughout history "he praised America for upholding freedom"......praised the US as a "light of liberty" in the world.......and emphasised the need "to defeat the anti-Americanism" etc etc ad nauseum

the clearest sign that Mr Blair had been replaced by a really rubbish robot was in his message for the French president, Jacques Chirac, who he hinted wanted to turn Europe into a rival power to the US. He said: "There is no more dangerous theory in international politics today than that we need to balance the power of America with other competitive powers, different poles around which nations gather."....(uh??????)

Mr Bush later lavished praise on Tony Blair for his "fabulous" speech. "He is a true friend of the American people."

WE ARE ENSLAVED NOT BY THE PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, NOR BY THE RULING CLASSES, BUT BY THE HEGEMONY OF TRUTH.

RESPECT FOR THE TRUTH IS JUST THE BITTER AFTER-TASTE OF RESPECT FOR GOD.

WE HAVE DECLARED GOD TO BE DEAD; TRUTH MUST SOON FOLLOW.

TRUTH IS ABSOLUTE, NOT WHAT 'WORKS' FOR YOU OR ME. TRUTH DOESN'T WORK FOR ANYONE.

ANY ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE FROM THIS REALITY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE. BUT THAT MUSN'T STOP US IN OUR EFFORTS; INEVITABILITY MUST BE CHALLENGED AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY.

NIHILISM IS THE LOGICAL END TO CRITICAL THOUGHT. THE ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY ANYTHING [INCLUDING THIS] CAN ONLY END IN FAILURE.

WHAT WE DEMAND IS NOT THE FAD OF POST-HEISENBERG SCIENTIFIC RELATIVISM, NOR THE DESPERATE AND VACUOUS PLEAS OF THE NEW AGERS, BUT A TOTAL REJECTION OF TRUTH IN ALL ITS INSIPID FORMS.

THE DISSEMINATION OF TRUTH RELIES ON OUR TRUST IN MEDIA . IF WE DESTROY THAT TRUST, BELIEF BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE. IN IT'S PLACE WE CAN CONSTRUCT PURELY IRONIC FAITH SYSTEMS OF OUR OWN.

ACADEMICS, MEDIA WORKERS AND OTHER REALITY ENFORCERS MUST BE OUSTED FROM THEIR POSITIONS OF POWER AND REPLACED BY THE CLINICALLY INSANE. WHAT IS INSANITY BUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSENSUS REALITY?

'CONSENSUS REALITY' IS WHAT MASQUARADES AS TRUTH; A REALITY CONVENIENT TO THOSE IN POWER, AND ACCEPTED AS 'THE WAY THINGS ARE' BY THE MASSES.

WE MUST MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO PROPAGATE ALTERNATIVE REALITIES, THROUGH ALL CHANNELS AVAILABLE. MOST IMPORTANTLY WE HAVE TO PLANT THESE VIRUSES IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, PRESENTLY THE MESSENGER OF THE INFORMATION OFFICIALS.

MASS ENDEMIC CONFUSION WILL EITHER LEAD TO AN ACCELERATED APOCALYPSE OR A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS ACROSS THE PLANET, EITHER OF WHICH IS PREFERABLE TO THE PRESENT STAGNANT STATE OF AFFAIRS.

Thursday, 17 July 2003

BIG BROTHER 4

no wonder people insist that creepy christian cameron is "the last gentle-man", when channel 4's highlights show fails to include his violent mysoginistic desire to "suffocate nush when she's drunk", similar to his desire to block lisa's windpipe the other week.

Wednesday, 16 July 2003

Divozenky, meaning "wild women," live in the woods and mountains. They are good-looking beings with large, square heads, long, thick hair (ruddy or black in color), hairy bodies, and long fingers. They live in underground burrows and have households like humans. The Divozenky know nature's secrets, and they can make themselves invisible from the use of certain plants. They are fond of music and singing; their dancing can cause storms. They used to be on friendly terms with humans, coming into their settlements to borrow household things. Those who left out some food for them were repaid in housework. Occasionally, they married human boys, and were excellent wives. They are driven away by disorderliness, and also by being called "wild women. They are dangerous to meet alone in the forest, for they will make you lose your way. They exchange their offspring for human babies; the former are then called Divous ("wild brats") or Premien ("changelings"), and are very ugly. The Divozenky are most powerful on Midsummer Night. Similar creatures include the Divji Moz, from Slovenia, a strong, dangerous Wild Man who lives in a cave, and the Czech Jezenky, half-animals, half-women who live in caves and kidnap children.

whatever the final wording, ultimately we'll just have to take our clothes off and give it a test drive won't we. your laws, our bodies. because at the end of the day the visible human body is not a crime. end of discussion.

and for anyone interested in a concise perspective of what naked protest is and isn't (i.e. "i am NOT a naturist nor an exhibitionist" etc) read this guardian letter written by me naked in prison segregation 2001.

yesterday evening i attended the voxpolitics meeting "can blogs change politics", in the westminster grand committee room. on my route to parliament i passed by: a shop display of the playstation eye toy (screen control via 'minority report' hand gestures); the latest copy of adbusters magazine ("PRE-EMPTIVE WAR IS TERRORISM"); and a pro-palestine demonstration contained on the otherside of the road from the downing st gates (sharon the war criminal is in town).

2 years back i was invited to the westminster grand committee room, as an ambassador for naked protest, for the launch of some token new labour lesbian and gay publication. the night before that attendance, one of the organisers had phoned me to apologetically ensure that i would turn up clothed for the event. i was clothed, though nudity would have minimised the nescessity for a security check, but i seemed to be the only person not in a suit and tie. and after witnessing a number of tiresome speeches by gay mps i promptly exited.

i've little appreciation for much architecture built longer than about 10 years ago, but i especially loathe the houses of parliament and long for a modern day guy fawkes to finish the job of demolishing it. i don't mind wether its real terrorists who do it or a uk remix of the operation northwoods script, just get rid of it.

inside its like some monstrous church or public school building and the number of suits that were gathering for the meeting quickly dampened my enthusiasm for being there. the formality of the committee room itself feels like being in court or a bored room, while the 4 invited speakers added little to disperse this impression. only the people present with their laptops, utilising the first wi-fi connection in there, reminded me we were in 2003 for a meeting about social software. (poverty limited me to a biro and paper. and i don't think the topic of poverty and access to social software revolutions was ever raised.)

i don't understand the point of anyone being a guest speaker unless they're going to say things that wouldn't otherwise be articulated by everybody else present. the speakers included tom watson whose name is constantly appendaged with 'the 1st blogging mp', reminiscent of dora the bearded lady or bobo the cycling chimp. and there were the inevitable unchallenged romantic assumptions that when more mps start to blog they will discover that "you have to be real". just why blogging is assumed to be honest i don't know? text allows for far more control over a persona's psychological leakage than face to face or to camera.

its curious, but it wasn't until i was there, in that building, with a 4 page printed hand out of helpful introductory blog suggestions for mps, that i realised that when i think of politics the last thing that comes to mind are politicians. i'd assumed this was going to be a meeting about real politics rather than career politics.

in general there was little meat in what people contributed, and they ran out of time before my hand-up to-speak was acknowledged. it was all incredibly short term in its perspectives, no discussion of the implications of real change. the possibility that evolved social software might eventually make members of parliament extinct for example.

but i met a lovely woman involved with getting my local council online, who i sat with but whose name i've forgotten unfortunately, and a man involved with spiked, which kind of made it worthwhile-ish. i'll write later about the issue of blogs and political change, after i've researched a little more. and theres a similar meeting in london later this week which i'll post the details for.

Monday, 14 July 2003

Sunday, 13 July 2003

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."(T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom)

Juliet Lyon, director of the prison reform trust, said: "..... with prison numbers at a record high, there could not be a more important time for prisoners and their families to speak out about the deteriorating conditions in many of our chronically overcrowded jails."

(....even if unfortunately its only preaching to the guardian readership.)

during a phone conversation this evening a freind told me that at some level they don't like their-self or how they look.

i suggested they radically ween themselves off of the amount of times they believe they need to use a mirror during each month. the less often we see ourselves, the more often we forget to think about what we look like, the less it matters.

Friday, 11 July 2003

Freud on super-heroes and super-villains?

"The man who, in consequence of his unyielding constitution cannot fall in with this suppression of instinct, becomes a 'criminal', an 'outlaw', in the face of society - unless his social position or his exceptional capacities enable him to impose himself upon it as a great man, a 'hero'."

as much as i love big brother i don't remember ever exercising my right to vote. not even during last year's spencer versus alex heavyweight nomination week.

not until tonight that is. i not only wasted 3 votes to get cameron out (82% voted for lisa.....who are these voters?) but i've also voted for both fed and jon in tonights evictee-re-entry novelty ratings booster.

i've always viewed the overly hyped potter world as being a contemporary enid blyton, all "jolly good chums" and other such sterilised middle class niceties, and it saddens me whenever any friends recommend that i should read them.

so it was refreshing to discover AS Byatt saying that the Rowling books "catered for readers with stunted imaginations" and "adults had become fans because the books allowed them to regress into the comfort zone of childhood."

author Fay Weldon praised byatt's courage for speaking out and said, "She is being a party pooper but then the party pooper is often right."

Thursday, 10 July 2003

"What happens if AIs start to expand their mental abilities and want to express their intellectual freedom regarding language? there's no point in limiting their intellectual freedom, if we want them to help us push the boundaries of human existence, this requires them to find words for things we as yet know nothing about."

"If we build artificial intelligences, we must ensure that they can communicate with us while we give them intellectual freedom to push boundaries. we need to ensure that AIs are both super-intelligent and able to conduct a meaningful exchange of thoughts."

an influential segment of the hetero-dictatorship said today that a specific offence should be created banning sex in public toilets

a spokes-drone said:"Sexual activity in public lavatories is clearly unacceptable. It can be offensive and alarming to those, including children, wishing to use a lavatory for the purpose for which it was intended. No one should have to witness overtly sexual behaviour in public that most people consider should take place in private."

excuse me, but don't you think instead it'd be better to spend time informing "most people" "including children" that sexual activity is NOT "offensive and alarming". for how much longer are we going to perpetuate this crap? wake me up when we've finally moved on.

i've said it b4, i'll say it again, these are the most insidiously conformist of times and trendyness is the new conservatism.

why else would so many people choose to be nothing more than well groomed dogs on state sanctioned leads.

how else could the bush regime get away with acting out the very definition of fascism, unless the majority of people are too afraid to rock the boat.

the older i get the more i want to retreat from the world. i'm tired of being singularly guaranteed to have to articulate and justify alternative perspectives within a group. tired of enduring the endless dissapointment of hearing people reciting dominant viral beliefs over and over again. its reached a point where i can barely tolerate to bother listening as far as the end of somebody's sentence, because i heard it from someone else yesterday and the day before. faces and names blur but the dog-eared script remains the same.

roll on the civil war, where the immediacy of strategy and battle wakes us up to whats really worth living and dying for, and gives us an appetite for freedoms.

"Do bloggers add clarity to a situation, or do they serve only to only confuse it further? And - a subject closer to some hacks' hearts - why the hell are these people writing for free, anyway?

It all depends on the blogger. But underestimate their power at your peril. Just ask former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, who was eventually hounded out of office by bloggers after the Jayson Blair plagiarism case.

What's more, the sensory data can be saved, allowing one sensation to be accessed indefinitely. They also have transmitted the ability to feel the contour of particular shapes from one person to another over the Internet. touch is not the only sense available across the Internet. Smell, too, can be transmitted.

flash mobsflash mobs are performance art projects involving large groups of people. Mobilized by e-mail, a mob suddenly materializes in a public place, acts out according to some loose instructions, and then melts away as quickly as it formed.

In New York, last Wednesday evening, a crowd of about 250, for an elaborate "mob ballet", was greeted by a "huge" police presence.

JOIN ME IN THIS COMMITMENT(pdf)LOYALTY: Bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and the Army.
DUTY: Fulfill your obligations.
RESPECT: Treat people as they should be treated.
SELFLESS SERVICE: Put the welfare of the nation, the Army and your subordinates before your own.
HONOR: Live up to all Army values.
INTEGRITY: Do what’s right, legally and morally.
PERSONAL COURAGE: Face fear, danger, or adversity.

Thursday, 3 July 2003

"the design of the virtual world must now therefore take its clues from humanity's interfaces with the pre-existing universe, and build in equivalents. The virtual world may then re-merge with (deterritorialize back into) the real world."

Ecotoneblogs increase span and wikis increase depth. The Ecotone wiki is intended as a portal for those who are interested in learning and writing about place. An ecotone is a term from the field of ecology. It is a place where landscapes meet -- like field with forest, or grassland with desert.
( via blackbeltjones )

Wednesday, 2 July 2003

australian housemate Chrissie, who isn't the slimmest of people, was undressing to take a shower when she heard a camera man from behind the wall say "I'd never go for a fat chick".

At the same time Channel 10 was playing late night live streaming footage, and the cameras cut away from Chrissie immediately. According to the live internet watchers she told the other housemates who yelled out "are you happy now" and "how unproffesional". Chrissie was called to the diary room.

The funniest part of the incident was when "Big Brother Trivia" was on. The host asked a person on the phone to pick a camera number. The person randomly picked a number which was the diary room. The host said "can we switch now Big Brother.... woah! What's happening in there!!!" [long pause] "oh sorry we can't cross to that camera because of technical difficulties".

Now the official forum has gone mad to cover their tracks - all forum posts about it are promptly deleted"

Self-powered DNA Computers Earn World Record"To your naked eye, it looks like a spoonful of water. But inside, trillions of tiny computers work away, performing 330 trillion operations per second with 99.9% accuracy, and doing so with a million times more energy efficiency than your computer.

Welcome to the rapidly advancing world of DNA computing, and to a computer recognized last week by Guinness World Records as the smallest biological computing device ever built. It is more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC."
via better humans

one of the children's play areas on my estate has been closed and fenced off for some time now. apparently this is because a child fell off one of the play things and the parents are sueing our landlords because the ground was too hard.

for fucks sake! its a cliche but its worth repeating: SHIT HAPPENS, GET OVER IT.

and on a similar note it was a breath of fresh air to read this in new scientist: "COUNSELLING CAN ADD TO POST DISASTER TRAUMA.""We have an ideology that it's 'good to talk'," says psychologist Simon Wessely of King's College London, who was involved in the research. "But sometimes that's not so".......Wessely believes counselling primes people to expect that they will suffer post-traumatic stress, and that this may be enough to trigger psychological problems after an incident. Talking through the event might itself add to the trauma for some survivors."

"only about 20 per cent of people who experience potentially traumatic events might need help."